Then he has gone down the road, arrested the first half dozen poor men he saw, put them in jail, and fined them fifty dollars each. The mine owner has paid the fines, and has made the men work for him to pay him back. This system of keeping a man for debt is called peonage. It is common in many Central American and South American countries.
Such injustice has too often discouraged the people of Mexico. Where such things happen, it is easy to understand why there are few schools and few indus tries of any sort; and why the people are so poor that they must live almost en tirely on corn cakes and beans. Mexico needs to learn the art of good gov ernment.
150. Unused resources.— The Southwestern Plateaus, especially the Mexican part, have great resources of silver, copper, and other metals. Some mines have deposits so rich that it will take at least a hundred years to work them out.
The beautiful forests on the highlands and mountains can produce much good timber, if the trees are not destroyed by fire or cleared off for pasture. The pastures of both the American and the Mexican parts are used to their full extent; the forests are not so used.
151. Learning to use the is not enough water for much irrigation, but there are some kinds of dry farming which may make large harvests. In parts of Africa which have about the same tempera ture and the same low rainfall as parts of these plateaus, the land has been made valu able (Sec. 556) by the cultivation of the
olive tree (Fig. 437), which has wonderful ability to withstand drought and produces oil good to eat.
The Indians of the plateau region have long eaten bread made of the ground of the mesquite, a native tree quite the equal of the olive in its ability to withstand drought. White men do not like to eat mesquite bread, but cattle eat the beans from the trees. In Hawaii (Sec. 907) the mesquite is an impor tant crop. There the dairy farmers use bean meal instead of bran and cottonseed meal, which are more costly. There may some day be wide expanses where long rows of olive, mesquite, and other drought-resisting trees will stretch across the dry Plateau.
Some of the Indians of New Mexico have shown how dry farming may fit dry lands. They grow a variety of bean that has lived in the dry country so long that it has learned to wait for rain. It will blossom, bear a few beans, stand throughout a few weeks of drought, grow again after the next shower, ripen more beans, and wait through further drought for a third period of production. This way of growing is very different from that of corn and most of our useful plants, which have a short season for fruiting, and then quickly die whether they have produced much, little, or nothing. Man has only begun. to make use of the wonderful qualities of many plants.